


the first rule of vulnerability

by prewars



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-28
Updated: 2014-05-28
Packaged: 2018-01-26 20:44:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1701935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prewars/pseuds/prewars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s two days before he realizes that no one is going to be coming for him, not like last time. They did not come for him, at first, when he took a train to New York City and found his accent echoed back to him from the mouths of the street, but still they came eventually, chasing him for three days before he was held down, kicked in the ribs, frozen again so immediately that, he thinks, they did not properly take everything from him. He still has New York City, much in the same way he was allowed to keep Kiev, Hamberg, Minsk, Volgograd; using him as his own warning to himself. The asset will always be recovered.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the first rule of vulnerability

**Author's Note:**

> My many thanks to everyone who shouted at me about this and who endured my laughing at them, I'm sorry I'm terrible but I appreciate your input and you're all wonderful. There should be more to come set before and after this, but the best laid plans of mice and men, etc.

Two miles from the Potomac he stops a car in the middle of the road and strips a man his height and weight of his jeans and his zip up hoodie, walks along secluded roads holding his shoulder at an odd angle, the cold fingers of his left arm curled in to the pocket of the jacket. All government officials will be preoccupied for hours before anyone stops to think of a body they had yet to drag from the river, but that's more than enough time for him to at least reach Mt. Vernon; the maps he was given burned in to his mind (with not much else) and he remembers forests for miles south of Washington. Secluded, lonely, no one to drag him back. Strap him in. No man from the bridge, no mission to stare at him like he was...anything.

Later, much later, they find out that the serum given to Rogers was duplicated, stripped, pulled apart and modified to give him only what they wanted him to have. Languages. Knowledge. How to speak Cantonese and how to strip a long distance sniper rifle in a minute in the dark. Take from him his pain. Take from him a healthy prefrontal cortical region. Take as much as he is given.

He finds a sapling thick enough to not snap when he grunts and slams his shoulder in to it, feet planted against the earth, popping his dislocated shoulder back in to place. It doesn't phase him except for the muscle memory of a grimace pulling on his lips.

They had buried a bag for him in the woods, made him memorize the coordinates before burning the print-out to a crisp and dropping it in a glass of water. The bag, in no particular order, regardless of the continent and regardless of the mission, always contains: rolls of cash in every denomination, US dollars and Euros and Russian rubles; a hunting knife, an army-grade pocket knife, and a survival bushman knife; flint and steel wool; a Walther P22 and magazine rounds; unidentifiable freeze-dried rations that he's certain are the same rations put in the bag two decades ago, tough and gritty and with no discernible flavor other than dry salt; a change of clothes, black, like most everything he has ever been given to wear. The same print of a novel he's been reading for seventeen years, managing sections here and there between being bleached clean, backtracking several pages every time he cracks it open to make sure he still remembers at least this.

It takes a few hours, shaking off exhaustion he has been trained to ignore, keeping far from populated areas around ground zero and trailing along side backroads he remembers from aerial maps fanned out in front of him. The river twists along his path in the form of creeks and streams branching out in to the sparse woods, he imagines he can see smaller carnage from the helicarriers crashed several miles away, beams lodged in red mud and screws embedding in the bank. He's been the catalyst of such destruction before, preferring long distance submachine guns and launchers due to the distance it affords him, the assurance of no bodily harm - a secondary instinct he was given by injection. The Red Room couldn't afford to lose the perfect assassin, a man with a hand that left no fingerprints, only lasting impression, DNA that would find no match in any system because his frozen blood pumped (and stopped and started and stopped and started) long before such technology came about.

His head has been aching since hitting the water, since failing his mission, but it's been so easy to forget, to ignore, since it was programmed in him to do so, since he was told "pain will not hinder you" and it didn't. One mission in Marseille, someone else's lifetime ago, left him walking ten miles to a safehouse in Malpassé with a broken wrist, still hefting a gun, never faltering. His head does not bother him, until it does, crouched down in the brush with his hidden bag pulled against his calf, reaching for the survival knife to strap to his waist in place of the one missing, probably at the bottom of the Potomac. Vaguely, he thinks, he was attached to that knife, had carried it for a while, would miss it if he had ever been allowed to.

Crouched low, rifling through the bundles of cash and zipping them in to pockets, it hits him as hard as it did in the vault, as hard as a full reset does, bows his head and bursts white in front of his eyes. It's not remembering, not yet, but something before that - the realization that there is something to remember. The understanding that something is gone. He's long since lost a concept of time - decades passing in cryogenic freeze having long since eliminated the need to bother, hours and days crouching on a roof for surveillance, for the perfect shot honing that skill - but it feels like ten, fifteen minutes before he can even open his eyes to the dark of the woods around him, not the river beside him or the sun above; too much light for the hammering headache he fights, pushes back.

He has a new objective, cobbled together from the escape route given to him, the phantom idea of what he was instructed to do on past missions, and it's not what he was told to do this time but it’s better than nothing. He can not fathom the idea of nothing, but Pierce had been so confident in his instruction that there had not been anything more in place than this, there was nothing for Pierce buried under the rubble of the Triskelion, nothing beyond following a GPS tracker to a getaway bag half stuck in the mud and then. A spark of pain runs the ridge of his right eye socket as he tries to push beyond that idea. They will come for him soon, and he will be wiped again.

Kneeling under an overpass, he disassembles each gun with the parts set on top of the jacket in the bag to avoid getting scattered, pulls the trackers from the inside of each gun like tiny stickers, pushes them in to the dirt with his heel and the reassembles each handpiece. He pulls off his vest and shirt still damp from the river, strikes the flint with the edge of his survival knife and sets fire to it all, watches until its nothing more than dry grass on fire, and grinds the flame to black with the heel of his boot.

He’s in Arlington, stealing a creased, round-rimmed baseball cap from a cafe table, when his vision goes white again, the image of his hands held and flexing in front of his face, flesh from what he can see in the dark, and then again, one gleaming metal, then again, wrapped around the throat of the man he left on the lake. Three hours pass with him tucked in an alley behind the Virginia Hospital Center, hiding behind the backup generators with the stolen cap pulled low over his brow, his hair tucked back in to the jacket collar, left hand stuffed deep in the pocket so that he at least was not hugely recognizable. He doesn’t register pain that well anymore, vaguely senses it like a limb fallen asleep when held at too odd an angle, but the war drum beating in his skull is a new sensation - he’d be glad for it, if he could think straight. It’s different, it’s new, it hasn’t been taken from him like most everything else, and in that sense the pain is a blessing.

It’s two days before he realizes that no one is going to be coming for him, not like last time. They did not come for him, at first, when he took a train to New York City and found his accent echoed back to him from the mouths of the street, but still they came eventually, chasing him for three days before he was held down, kicked in the ribs, frozen again so immediately that, he thinks, they did not properly take everything from him. He still has New York City, much in the same way he was allowed to keep Kiev, Hamberg, Minsk, Volgograd; using him as his own warning to himself. The asset will always be recovered.

He comes back to a low-rise roof beside the hospital generators every night but spends more and more time each day branching out in to Arlington, eyes glancing back and forth on crowded streets for the tell-tale sign of someone spotting him, of handlers come to subtly press a taser against the curve of his ribs as a threat. It doesn’t come, it doesn’t come as he finds the name James Buchanan Barnes under Steven Rogers on a memorial plaque to something called the Howling Commandos, several feet over from a plaque dedicated to the Flying Tigers Armed Forces Group. It doesn’t come as he buys a newspaper with the Triskelion’s destruction on the front page, a full spread on the desolate state of America’s intelligence community and what it means for modern politics and the election in two years. (He skips entire paragraphs about the information spread across the internet, everything that was saved before damage control could be conducted, but the name Natasha Romanoff catches his eye, he reads through the paragraphs on her and folds the corner of the page as another migraine hits him. He recalls the whip of red hair through the distorted views of car windows and smoke.)

“Did you know someone who worked there?”

He looks up; he had stopped beside the display of newspapers in the convenient store, his gloved hands shaking so that the newspaper trembled, and his face must have been contorted because the girl at the counter looks concerned. It is not an expression he often sees turned towards him.

“I said, did you know anybody who worked there, when it collapsed?"

He swallows, forces his hands to steady, and nods sharply, not quite the reaction he was expecting to give until after it’s already been given. “I did.”

The girl purses her lips sympathetically and lets him have the newspaper, and he tucks it under his arm as he leaves, turns immediately for the rooftop of the hospital. He reads and re-reads the articles about Natasha Romanoff and the column beside the picture of the man he left gasping for air on the shore of the river, his objective, the name on the plaque in the cemetery. The paper is calling for their accountability, for them to be held responsible, but they don’t know anything about the way Rogers was fought every step of the way, they know nothing about how responsible he truly is, how that blame lies split upon several dead bodies, and a missing asset.

He lays the paper at the bottom of the duffle bag and stacks his knives back on top of it.

 

 

 

It’s two weeks of a perimeter established and traced on foot around the city day in and day out, scouting potential snipers nests like an old, familiar habit, before he follows the image of a shield with a star in the center on a small boy’s chest, follows it and looks up to find himself in the Smithsonian museum.

He comes back every day for a week.

The exhibit has his objective’s face plastered all over it, an American shrine to a war hero come back to life, Steve Rogers, in red, white, and blue, except all the photographs and video footage is in black and white, and it gushes such overt patriotism that it makes his teeth hurt, but he has long since stopped thinking of the Soviet Union as home, because it did not feel like home, because it only ever felt as cold as the room immediately after he was woken, ice in his eyelashes.

It takes him a minute to recognize the face on one of the displays, only because he catches it in the reflection of storefront glass windows and the dark, mirror-plated walls set up around the museum to show children their own faces when they are lifted up to the image of an American soldier saluting. It takes him a moment, but he recognizes the man with his face.

He sits in the film room for hours, watching newsreels and clips, interviews, filler pieces on the impact Captain America has had on American history and politics since his supposed death. Captain Rogers, too, was pulled from ice, and he wonders if the same chill settles in his bones as well. If he turns his face towards the sun sometimes and shivers.

He watches the clips of James Buchanan Barnes the closest of any, the constant loop of mannerisms and the way his mouth sloped to the side when he grinned, a shaky reel of him of pressed against a berm focusing a sniper rifle. Like a story he once heard told by someone then repeated with different names, here and there, different minute details, it all seems familiar like the weight of a semi-automatic in the small of his back. On the fifth day he watches the people visiting the exhibit more than the actual exhibit itself, girls looped and pressed around photos of Captain Rogers post-serum, a college student taking notes half on the back of a napkin and half on his phone, a father and his daughter both in Captain America t-shirts. Her backpack is fashioned in to his shield.

The dark of the theater room helps with his head and how it aches, constantly, and one day, mid-morning on a Tuesday where it's practically only him and the museum workers, he nearly falls asleep in the back row, leaning against the wall with his jacket pillowed behind him. The reels are comforting, perhaps because it's easier to put himself in them, to pretend he could have once been the person in the films - James Buchanan Barnes' mouth twitched while he lined up his scope, favored his left leg when someone filmed their return from a prisoner camp in Poland, and that night when he returns to the rooftop, he traces the line of a knife wound on his thigh. He tries to recall where he got it, thinks perhaps of Prague, but too long with his flesh fingers pressed to the scar and red blossoms across his field of vision and he gives up, rolls over and pulls a hunk of jerky from one of the ration packs included in his duffle.

He has never before needed to remember, they told him not to. Once that had been enough but now, he thinks, it is a reason to try.

 

 

 

If he has ever dreamed before, it was taken from him like most else; when on assignment, he rarely sleeps more than four hours, light and black and filled with nothing but the expectation of waking. He holds on to glimpses, like the spark of red hair through gun smoke, the press of bodies at a carnival or a fair with the scent of grease and butter on his fingertips, laying with his spine straightened on the hardwood floor, feeling the rattling of a train in his muscles as it passed, closing his eyes. It is never anything he's ever been allowed to keep.

That night, he dreams of a train rattling, passing through tunnel after tunnel, and the sheer drops of mountainsides after the tunnels, and the shifting of ice in a slow river below.

He wakes to a nose bleed, and scrubs the brown rust stains from his shirt with his toothbrush.

He buys a screwdriver set and moves his belongings to the roof of the Post Library; he’s cagey, uncomfortable with the same position for too long. Guards, night watch, wandering eyes - most eyes are focused on papers, on the wreckage, on government workers, on the broadcasts from the Hill, on Natasha Romanoff. Testifying. He sees her, volume so low he can only read their lips, hunched over a cup of coffee at the deli. She’s still favoring her left shoulder, the one he shot her in, her fingers squeezing her bicep and the corner of her lip jumping. They’re tells so easily rooted out that they feel familiar, and he wonders if he was shown footage beforehand. The idea that was possible, that he doesn’t remember, that he has to question it…he squeezes his coffee cup so hard he hears the rim crack, sees a chunk of porcelain fall in to the liquid, and tosses a bill down on the table without looking at it before he leaves.

Sitting on the roof of the hospital, he tries to fix the dead simulated nerve endings in his left arm and his small finger that won’t straighten, and it’s crude but effective with his wrist curled awkwardly in his lap, nothing he hasn’t done before no matter the advances to technology. In Paris, early in his life, before they realized that they could not leave him thawed for too long, he unhinged and took apart his hand, then his wrist, more of a desire to kill time when there was no information to be gathered, no target to be sighted from a high floor near a staircase. They can not take from him what’s unimportant, their wiping more and more careless as time dragged on. It was either not enough or too much taken from him, every time the scientist different, the hand pressing a rubber ball in to his mouth never the same.

He only stops when his vision blurs, screwdrivers still in his mouth, moves to press a finger at the inner corner of his eye to alleviate the pain.

It’s been nineteen days marked on the corner of the newspaper folded in the bottom of his bag, and it’s the longest he’s been awake in…longer than he can remember. Which is never that long. The woman at the deli recognizes him and waves when he comes in despite the fact that he does not wave back, that it took him three days to croak out a “hello” before asking for a coffee and nothing more. He tries not to sleep if it’s not absolutely necessary, and his nose drips red, smeared along his leather glove when he catches it.

He has a stack of newspaper on the roof pressed against the wall, lays them one on top of each other, pulls out pages related to the helicarrier crash and the investigation on the front page. He tries to pretend his gut doesn’t pull when he reads Captain Steve Rogers’ name - his gut doesn’t pull, it never pulls, not even with a finger on the trigger.

It’s twenty one days thawed, three days without sleep, when he heaves whatever’s left on his stomach in to a street trashcan and retrieves his bag from the library roof, tugs the ball cap down over his eyes and sets out for an office building across the river.

He tells himself, as he walks, that it’s a safety precaution against being taken in again, against being followed, to move every few days. To go to the places he would last be expected. Telling himself that he is following instinct is less comforting than it should be, less so than knowing what to do and knowing he can execute it. There is a file in Moscow, and another in Kiev, and a long table of men under dull cold lights, who have these files, every mission he has ever been acquired for, every objective completely, stamped, marked. These files have his name in them, and there is no single name that has not been crossed out.

Whatever this is that he has disintegrated in to, it is not as sharp, as convicted as his mind once was, like with the steady nosebleeds he is also losing his mind, day by day. He spent his time in Arlington watching soldiers and marines stalk the streets, expanding his perimeter day by day in to the streets and scanning back and forth across crowds for anyone who looks at him longer than a few seconds. The paranoia always sets in after too long awake in both senses, after too long without a handler coming to him, always knowing where he is. As if he’s constantly expecting punishment for mission failure, confused as to if he was given a time frame that he did not remember.

 

 

 

This is a memory that may not be true: in 1959, his name was Javier Francisco, and his friends called him Javi. His Spanish was perfectly accented. He worked for a family in Saragossa, and his own lived in Bizkaia, not so far that he could not justify visiting on the weekends, leaving by foot and reporting to a safe house in city limits. He worked for the family for months before the order came through, all their bodies still in their beds, white cotton sheets so light and cool in the summer stiff with dried blood, even the children, and when the mission was complete he then left their home in the dark of night and was picked up two miles away by an old military jeep from the war. They took most of it from him, but for a while, well in to the seventies, he remembered drinking from a bottle of wine while perched in the low-hanging branches of a tree on the property, dropping the glass bottle with a thunk when it was empty. It was too sweet, warm from sitting in the barn, and he tasted the bitterness of it for days.

 

 

 

He spends two days on the roof and one night in a hotel that doesn’t ask questions when cash is offered and a face is coincidentally hidden from security camera view by a low-set baseball cap. He doesn’t sleep that night, sits at the small round table and flips up the metal panels of his forearm, continues to dig in and pry with his screwdrivers. Before, it was repair. Now, with his fingers curling in to a fist and responding against the trigger of a gun to his satisfaction, he’s curious. He doesn’t think he’s ever been this curious before.

The next night, he presses the barrel of his gun under the chin of a KGB defector named Reznikov, now graying and slightly deaf in one ear, until his flawless English yields and he stammers in Russian and agrees to gets him a passport.

He holds a gun to Reznikov’s dick as he shaves in his bathroom, gives him a blank stare when Reznikov points to the hollow of his throat and says, “you missed a spot.” He keeps his hair long but tied back, pulled in to a bun at the base of his skull (it gives him another cover, another image to disappear in to quickly with scissors should the need arise) and runs a flesh hand across his smooth jaw before sitting in the corner of Reznikov’s office until it’s time to leave for his flight.

Kirill Reznikov assisted with the creation of his identities, his papers, elaborate backstories with very few holes, for seventeen years before defecting to the United States. He was an aborted mission for the Winter Soldier, pulled at the last moment when it was discovered that the information he had provided the U.S. was the falsified lines he had been fed under suspicion during his last year with the Room, and therefore not harmful to the motherland.

Reznikov is not interesting conversation with a gun trained on him, though he keeps trying, hands him a box of tissues from the corner of his desk when his nose starts to drip blood again.

With the thick paper of a passport still warm from printing, he looks down at the name Mikhail Pravdin and repeats it once, just once, rolling the sound around in his mouth like chocolate waiting to melt. It's nice (or it would be if the word registered anything within him more than a thump of pulsing blood behind his eyes that signaled an oncoming headache) to have a name for himself after so many weeks of nothing, anymore. Sergeant Barnes is nothing more than a history textbook footnote in the chapter about Captain Steve Rogers and the legacy of Captain America, and the Winter Soldier was painstakingly hidden from public history, a ghost.

Before he leaves - Mikhail Vitaly Pravdin, an Ukrainian Education major, studying abroad with a sparse paper trail behind him, flimsy enough to dissipate if someone cared to push harder but adequate for a commercial flight to Russia with border checks - he shoves Reznikov against the wall with a knife to the curve of his jawline, stares long enough for Reznikov to squirm under the press of his forearm. When the movement earns a trickle of blood down the neck, he demands, "Who has my files?"

"There are still so many bases, so many active agents - "

He presses harder on the knife, presses to get through the non-answer.

"They have it scattered. One will have your medical files, one the experiments, one - the list. Your list."

He wants it all, he realizes. He is disgusted at the thought of a thick folder about his freezing and unfreezing, about the machinations of his arm, but he wants them. Even if he will never read them. He releases Reznikov and shoves him towards the table in his hallway where a pad of paper and a pen lay beside a home phone. He gestures at the paper as if to say, 'start writing.' When Reznikov is finished, his hand shakes as he holds out the folded paper, names scribbled in Cyrillic at a slant.

"Do something for me," he demands, and the snort he receives in response makes his lip twitch downward. "They will come for me, when they find out I helped. They sent you last time, I know, but this time they will finish it. Close my file, as it were, permanently."

He shakes his head a little, as if to clear his head, like the words are muffled through cotton.

"I only think it fair you destroy me, as I had a hand in creating you."

He's been begged before - this is not new. Trembling hands and terrified eyes and snot running from noses, hands grappling at his body, but they only ever begged for life, for him to restrain from taking it. He’s being asked to commit a mercy killing.

He almost throws up. It’s never really been an issue before.

It takes him a minute to choke it down before he reaches for the gun in the small of his back and tosses it, grip up, toward Reznikov, not caring if he catches it or not. “Do it yourself.”

He leaves.

 

 

 

He does not remember the flight - not that particular flight, at least. He remembers the deep depths of a ship, so dark and the edges beat back by fluorescent lighting that he was sure he’d never see the sun again, and then the bump and rattle of a transport truck with a canvas top that felt like turbulence in an airplane if he closed his eyes tight enough. He remembers very little of the flight to Kiev except that the person with the seat beside his would try to speak occasionally (harsh English softened around the edges with the curl of a French tongue, and his first instinct was to respond in French - why?), then sit back, discouraged by his silence and white knuckles.

He does not sleep - it’s impossible when there are so many unassessed threats that could be lurking in the rows of seats, so many people he knows nothing about, has not checked out, and it has him grinding his teeth.

In Kiev, it’s unseasonably cold, and for the first time since he was thawed, it’s not the uneasy feeling of half-remembered sounds and scents and brushes against his skin that settles along his bones, it’s familiarity. He knows this dry wind, even if he has not felt it in years, and he pauses in the mouth of an alley, bites down on his lip and lets his eyes close (not for too long, not long enough for anyone to approach him, just long enough to revel in a way he has never been allowed). After a moment, he tilts his face toward the sun where it’s cracking behind a sallow apartment complex, and then continues walking.

After three hours, he’s set his own perimeter of the city, vetted several empty buildings that would seem like their occupants were about to quickly return to their paperwork and outdated computers if it were not for chunks of ceiling collapsed, piles of wood in the middle of the hall, half the monitors missing or smashed in. It’s in one of these buildings he drops his bag, presses his body along the side of an intact window and jerks the bottom pane up so he can see past the grime of neglect. To his left, rising high above the city, he can see Berehynia. It smells of smoke and cold air and the sting of ozone, and he doesn’t watch the sunset so much as he waits for it to finish.

The cluster of state buildings in the center of the city has heavier security than it has in the past twenty years but he recalls more soldiers, more guns, the sick snap of a spine in just the right way to kill instead of paralyze. Knife held at hip level, pressed against locked French doors, for a moment he suddenly craves the quiet of long range, of his body pressed against a gravel roof top. He forgets how to grip his knife.

The top levels are less secure, the bulk focus on the entrances, metal detectors, security cameras, patrol stalking back and forth, and it takes very little effort to push off the roof looking over Presidential Administration building, tucking his limbs underneath his body so he rolls as he lands, metal hand digging in to the gravel to halt his movement.

Espionage, breaking in, missions that are not drenched in blood and requiring proof of death, this is not his forte. He leans over the edge of the roof to check the patrol in the street and remembers smoke and plastic shields, remembers barreling through masses holding on to the edge of a police van windshield screen, reaching out with his metal hand to grasp the neck of protesters, of targets, of objectives, using the cover of riot violence to his advantage. He rolls back against the ledge of the roof and squeezes his eyes shut again, roughly jams the edge of his jacket sleeve up to his nose to stem the bleeding before standing and continuing, and he can hear the grinding of his wrist and the hydraulics in it this close to his ear - the fluid in the joint must be so old, frozen and thawed and barely thought of as something to change.

It isn’t hard to dodge guards on the top floor, to hold his breath when they pause before turning on a polished boot heel and retreating, because this he knows, not getting caught is something he was trained for. Vaguely, he thinks of a broken tooth in the back of his mouth, of cyanide, thinks of interrogation techniques, of a week beaten and bloody without information spilt, without really feeling it, because he was told not to, and he does nothing if not follows instructions. Now, he tongues the crack in his back tooth on the top left, feels the jagged edge where it could cut his tongue if he pressed hard enough and pulled the muscle back, and continues on.

The patrol on the level he's on is weak, a slow and lazy amble shared between three guards in varying shades of blood from freshly spilt bright red to dried and flaking rust brown. They are too confident in the guards below them, in the height of the building, in their own abilities, in the ornamente pistols strapped to their hips, and he doesn't even have to incapacitate them to cover his trail, only press his back to dark corners and sides of walls and wait for them to pass by.

Three long, cold hallways from his entry on a locked balcony, the lock now crunched to a metal mess on the floor, and he finds what he's looking for - a keypad hidden in the garish paneling of a steel-reinforced door. He pulls off the glove of his right hand and molds over the grooved metal of his thumb a cold, pliable silicone gel from his pocket. It sparks to contact with his thumb, glittering electric white for a second, and he glances around for anyone who may have heard the crackle. When he presses it to the security pad the screen flashes white for a few seconds before "access granted" appeared in green. He pressed his weight against the door as soon as the handle clicks, smearing off the gel on his thumb and rolling it in to a quick ball to put back in his pocket.

The room isn't empty. He can't see anyone, no shadow on the floor between walls and walls of hard drives and electric ribbons, but he can feel it in the air. The door clicks behind softly but it's enough of an alert and there's a clattering of a metal shelf sliding back in to place. He reaches for his knife.

"I was only twenty minutes off, I definitely thought you would've moved before sunset."

He freezes with the blade parallel to his forearm held out in an attack stance, his legs at an angle with the left of his body leaning forward, just in case he needed the full force of his weight.

"How long have you been following me?" His voice is raspy and wilted in his throat, and it's only by sheer force of will that he doesn't clear it after the words have left his mouth.

"The airport in D.C. I had a friend flag every handsome thirtysomething flying to Kiev or Moscow for weeks. It was like an invasive, spy Google Alert."

A head of short, blonde hair flashes between the sightline of the computer storage shelves and thick wiring, and then it stops (two rows back, six feet over, line of sight a good half a foot shorter than his).

"I guess that sentence doesn’t mean a lot to you. But here you are, so I was right."

"Have you come to deactivate me?" He’s still hoarse, like his voice clawing to the top of his throat. He’s more afraid of that answer than he would like to admit but, that’s new, that’s...interesting, but there’s also disgust at the feeling stewing in his gut.

The voice doesn’t answer him, but it glides away from a standstill and closer, he watches it come closer and doesn’t move, his hunting knife still held out to attack. After a silent moment, Natasha Romanoff from the newspapers in the bottom of his bag comes to stand a safe, defensible distance from him and does nothing to hide her long, dragging gaze up his body. She looks like a loose sketch based off the inch-tall image in newsprint, like an approximation of Natasha Romanoff, hair cut short and dragged to one side with artful half-curls and waves, clear plastic-rimmed glasses resting on her nose. He would be willing to bet the lenses are even prescription because she is a spy, she is a shadow, and the small details are everything, like the citrus perfume in the air around her, the edge of a flower tattooed on her ankle, the long few cat hairs on the skirt of her dress. The brush strokes.

"You deactivated most of your trackers in Virginia but your arm is still on the grid. You need it taken care of if you’re going to keep moving." It’s not an answer, yet it is, and he lets the knife drop a few inches but his grip is still white-knuckled.

"Are you going to take me in?" He doesn’t expect a straight answer, but another non-answer will do as long as he knows if he has to fight her or not. His fingers remember the garrote cutting to the bone, the pressure in his ears as she squeezed her thighs around his head, remembers cars. A whip of red hair between shattered car windows. He squeezes his eyes against the oncoming headache and hopes in the dark, blue glow of the servers in the room that she can't see it. Of course she does.

"The last two times we met, you shot me. Granted neither of them were kill shots but I'm still a little sore from the last one, I'll tell them you overpowered me." Natasha shrugs, although it's stiff, and he only remembers one bullet, only remembers a bridge, but nods shortly. "There are several people who are determined not to let anyone reformat you, James. You have nothing to worry about."

"James?"

"Bucky was never a name I knew you by."

Her honesty is so sharp and readily offered that it hurts in between his ribs like the sharp ache of running too long, too fast. It makes it easier to accept her.

"How long have we known each other?"

Her head tilts, now, and she shifts her fingers around the hard drive she holds at her side. The movement is more at home on a predator scouting prey than it is on a woman, something about it so calculating that he feels like a cut of meat in the lion's cage exhibit. Instinctively, he raises his knife again several inches in front of his chest.

"That's a complicated question. For me, it's...all of this life. Most of another. For you, decades. Months. A few minutes." She smiles and there is nothing to smile about. "It's all relative."

"Do people who know you learn to ask only yes or no questions?" It's as close to snapping as he can manage, his eyes narrowing for a second.

Natasha smiles again, softer this time, says, "It's more of a second language, they get used to it." She strides past him, passes within arm's reach which demonstrates so much trust that it freezes him again, and goes for the door, tucks the flash drive in to the cap of a tube of lipstick and twists, so that dark red peeks from the top. "You can come with me, and I can help with the GPS in your arm, or you can go, on your own." She turns to look at him now, eye to eye, and it unnerves him, unsettles him. He's been unsettled for weeks. "James, I know it's...nothing feels solid. It never really does. There'll always be the feeling you skipped a page of the book, missed it, and the doubt doesn't go away. Like you don’t know which day to trust as the truth and which has been a lie, even though you’ve woken up both mornings. But you find those who will tell you the truth, or the version of it that you agree with. You learn to live with it."

“You’ve told me the truth?” It’s skepticism that ties itself to his tone, bitter and justifiable.

“The version of it you’d agree with.” And it’s that sharp honesty again.

Natasha slips out the door without a sound.

James follows her.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Fist" by Diana Rahim.
> 
> But this is probably why  
> we raise arms against others,  
> push guns against their backs,  
> connect phalanges to cheekbones.  
> It is the first rule of vulnerability -  
> pretend to be otherwise. Pretend  
> that the blood coating your thin skin  
> is not your own bleeding.


End file.
